What has happened since my last post?  I traveled to Kohn Kaen with all the exchange students, including past, future and current exchangers to help teach the future students about what they will be experiencing in the next year. It was also the last chance for the inbounds to all spend time together. Honestly there was not much for us inbounds to help with during the weekend so we had a lot of free time to hang out with our best friends one last time. Me and my friends found some bikes and biked around little thai towns in the middle of nowhere. It was so much fun and is probably one of my favorite memories from my year in Thailand. On the last day of our Rotary weekend the inbounds were given our exchange certificates and were graduated from the rotary youth exchange program in district 3340. It was very emotional for all of us to say goodbye and it was a very loud wake up call that my year in Thailand, that back in September seemed would never end, is ending in 2 short months. I will go leave Thailand on July 10th and arrive in Portland on July 11th. After saying goodbye to everyone we all went back to our seperate cities. The next week I went to Bangkok with my host family. I'd only ever been to bangkok one other time and unfortuantely I got food poisoning on that trip. My host family took me to see all the sights of bangkok the grand palace, Emerald temple, the giant shopping malls, the otop center and tons of other things. Bangkok is a very cool city and I only wish I could have spent more time exploring it. We came home Sunday night and then had one day to get organized before the new semester of school started. I was excited to be going back to school, mostly because I was pretty bored with my host families house and was ready to see all my Thai friends again. School was fine the first couple days but since my class is now in M.6 (seniors) they are studying all the time and school has become very serious for them also since it is still the hot season it is unbearably hot. My second week of school I ended up going to Ubon on tuesday and Wednesday to say goodbye to 2 of my best rotary friends who I won't be able to see again before we all go home. This was the first goodbye I had to say to close friends but it really didn't feel like goodbye and so it's hard to wrap my mind around the fact that I won't be seeing them again for most likely a couple years. There isn't anything else exciting that has happened lately. A new mall opened up in Ubon and it has starbucks and Mcdonalds which has been pretty fun for us exchange students. As my time in Thailand is slowly starting to come to an end I just want to say that this has been an amazing experience and it still all feels like a dream. And it all went by way too fast it feels like just yesterday I was stepping off the plane into the humid, smothering Bangkok air and now I'm looking forward to getting on the plane and returning to Oregon. I have truly loved my time here in Thailand and I will never forget this year. I have become an entirely new person and I am so ready to see how my life in Tigard will be different after the experiences I've had here, I am ready to come home!

Football, Water Fights and Grey's Anatomy

I know what you're all thinking, another post?! Usually you barely get one once a month but with no school and all my thai friends studying in big cities and all my exchange friends living in those same cities I am a little bored. I spend most of my days playing games with my host brother, eating and watching TV. Right now I'm specifically working my way through all the seasons of Grey's Anatomy. Also so you all don't think I'm being super lazy, it is incredibly hot, so hot it takes energy just to sit outside. April is the hottest month of the year in Thailand and it is also the hottest weather I have ever felt in my entire life. On to some exciting things I have done lately, 2 weeks ago I got to travel with my host mom, brother and grandma too Buriram. Buriram is about 3 and a half hours from Kantharlak and we went there for one night. The first night me and my brother went to watch a Buriram football game. It was a good game they won 2-0. It was the first professional sports game I've attended in Thailand and thankfully I learned that the Thais can support sports pretty much the same as we do in America. The stadium was packed and there was even a Buriram Tide that I hate to saw it was even bigger and louder than the Timbers Army. Buriram's colors are dark blue and white and I'm pretty sure every fan attending the game had on a dark blue jersey which was pretty cool to see in the stands. The next day we had to get up at 6 to go to my host mom's neices wedding. It was the first Thai wedding I'd attended start to finish and I must say it was very boring. It all happened in the morning and we were on the road heading home by noon. The wedding was small and the ceremony lasted forever but in true thai fashion not everyone was paying attention most people wer talking to eachother playing with their phones or eating. There was so much food, if I remember correctly 7 or 8 courses of different very expensive, special thai foods. I got to try shark fin soup, wild mushrooms, lots of noodles and other things. After the wedding we went home because in 2 days Songkran would start :) Songkran is the Thai new year this year it took place on April 13, 14 and 15th. The Thais celebrate with a giant 3 day long water fight! It was definitely one of the highlights of my exchange year. I decided to stay in Kantharalak to expierence a small town Songkran festival with my Thai friends and family. I am really, really happy I chose to do this because it gave me a chance to see friends that I hadn't seen in months and as always I was super popular and that's always fun when people are shouting your name and running just to see you. It's hard to explain the madness that is Songkran it is really something you just have to expierence for yourself. I'm having trouble even trying to explain the basics. Basically it's just a giant water fight people set up along the main roads in town and then other people sit in the back of pick up trucks and drive around getting splashed with water and splashing people with water from buckets they've filled up and put in the trucks. In the center of town it's super insane with so many people and cars and mini concerts every few blocks and for some reason they put baby powder on your face and everyone wanted to put powder on me so my face was very white for most of the days. I still don't think I've been able to expalain Songkran accurrately, it's just one of those things you need to expierence for yourself. But needless to say it was so, so, so much fun and i was so bummed when it was over.
My year in Thailand is winding down I passed my 8 month anniversary of coming to Thailand at the beginning of April and on April 10th it marked 3 months until I will be on a plane heading home. My 17th birthday is a week from today and I'm very excited to be celebrating it Thai style with my friends and then in May I will hopefully be traveling to Bangkok with some exchange friends if all goes as planned. I am so Thankful to have had this expeirence and I am looking forward to seeing what adventures these last 3 months hold!

From March 21st to April 1st our rotary district traveled to the South of Thailand on our last official trip together. All the students met in Korat, the biggest city in our district, then took a bus down South. It was a very long drive but we eventually made it to Krabi, a city on the Indian Ocean. We visited the Emerald Pools and a natural hotspring on the first day. The emerald pools were these crystal clear pools in the rainforest and we got to go swimming in them. The hot springs were amazing! They were pools that overflowed making a waterfall that flowed into a river. We spent the night at a hotel in Krabi and the next day we went out to the ocean on a private boat and visited islands in the Malacca Straits. It was the first time I'd ever seen beaches with white sand or water so clear you could see the fish swimming at the bottom of it. I went snorkeling for the first time in my life and that was another thing I will never forget. I almost felt like one of the fish in the coral reef while snorkeling it was cool! We spent all day out taking the boat around to different islands and got back late in the afternoon. We spent another night in Krabi and ate dinner at a fancy restaurant built on top of a lake. After dinner we went to a night market to buy souvenirs but I had to go home early because I was dehydrated the sun is so strong down on the water you don't even notice how much it affects you until later. Luckily I was only sick that night and the next day I was ready to go on a boat for 5 hours to one of the Similan Islands. We got a boat just for our rotary group spent all day on it it was acutally very relaxing and peaceful out in the middle of the ocean, I've always loved the ocean and boats so I had a blast. We spent 2 nights on the island and there were barely any other people there it was absolutely beautiful. The next day we spent island hopping on the boat. Unfortuantely disaster struck on this day and my new underwater camera that I had to buy right before the trip becasue I broke my first one got water in it or something and stopped working :( But it was okay becasue  I got to snorkel some more and we spent sometime just swimming and jumping off the side of the boat into the open ocean which made up for my broken camera. That night on the island we sat out on the beach until pretty late, it was very magical and felt like our own private island because we were practically the only ones there. The next day we took the boat back to the bus and then took the bus to Phuket. So our 5th day was spent mostly traveling but that was okay because I was really needing to catch up on some sleep. When we got to Phuket we checked into our hotel then got dressed up to go to Phuket Fantasea. All I knew about Phuket Fantasea was that it had the biggest buffet in Thailand and for exchagne students that was pretty exciting. Phuket Fantasea was sort of like the Disneyland in Thailand it was very beautiful and we saw an amazing elephant show in which they used all sorts of real animals including elephants and even a tiger right there on stage in front of us! The buffet was pretty good and I got to eat spaghetti for the first time in a long time which was definitely a plus. The next day instead of taking us to another temple or something the rotarians took us to play paintball which was very fun! It was my first time playing and I found out I have a pretty good aim and only got hit once but I don't enderstand why anyone would want to play paintball in Thailand it is much, much, much too hot! After paintball we went to eat McDonald's then shopping at  a shopping mall and market. After we went back to the hotel to relax before going to see the sunset at a famous cliff. Unfortuantely I didn't get to see the whole susnset because of all the clouds but I did get some pretty awesome pictures with my friends. After the sunset was a seafood dinner which was okay but I really am not the biggest seafood fan so i didn't eat much. I know I haven't said anything about what Phuket is known for the parties, stripclubs, bars etc. I did see many of these things and it was very sad to see the girls who worked there. I had always heard stories about these kind of places and it really did show me the other part of Thailand that I've never seen in my little world in Kantharalak. I don't really want to talk about all that so on to the next day. We packed up and headed out on the bus to do even more shopping. We drove most of the afternoon and all night to get to a town a couple hours outside of Bangkok. In the morning we went to the floating market where all of the market is in boats and to see the merchandise you have to ride in a boat, it's actually really cool! After the market we visited an old WWII train and a cemetery for the Prisoners of war and forced Asian laborers who had to build the railway. The Thailand-Burma railway, also known as the Death Railway was built by Japanese POW. It is called the Death Railway because during its construction around 106,000 POWs and laborers died. The cemetery was also a war memorial. It looked exactly like war memorials at home which was weird because it was the first one I'd seen since coming to Thailand. We spent one more night in a hotel and had a fancy dinner on a river all together because tomorrow we would be going back to Korat then to our separate cities. It's always sad to say goodbye after the trips because the other exchange students become your family and best friends while your away from home. I know I'll never forget all the amazing things I saw, the crazy things I did with my best friends, new foods I tried and all the laughs I had with rotary district 3340!

I feel like all my posts have started with an apology and I apologize for that! I just have been very busy for the past few months and updating my blog has become less important for me. But I apologize because I know it is important for my friends and family back home because it is your only way of knowing what I am up to! My last post was on December 1st which feels like just yesterday, before I came on exchange I was warned by past exchange students that time was going to fly and wow does it really! But anyway since my update I moved into my second host family. I didn't know much about them before I moved in but it turns out they are an even better match for me than my first host family. While I liked my first family very much and they were so nice and good to me they were very strict and busy all the time so I had a lot of down time and got bored quite a bit. In my 2nd family I have an 11 year old brother and a sister the same age as me who is on exchange in Illinois right now. My parents own a warehouse about 2 kilometers outside of the main part of town we live in a renovated portion of the warehouse. About a week after I moved into my 2nd host family's home I left for my second rotary trip to the north of Thailand. We traveled for 9 days and say so many incredible sites. The north of Thailand was originally were I wanted to live while on my exchagne so I was very excited for this trip. We spent 3 days in Chiang Mai, visited the highest point in Thailand, saw ruins of old temples, rode elephants and saw the famous white temple. This trip was over Christmas and since my district is just the best ever on Christmas night we had a party with real christmas foods and did a secret santa gift exchange. This Christmas definitely wasn't what I was used to but I made the best of it and even though it was hard being away from my family I got to celebrate with my rotary family so I think that made up for it. I arrived back home in Kantharalak on the 27th and luckily didn't have school until the 2nd of January so I could catch up on the sleep I didn't get while on my trip. For New Years I celebrated with my host family. They have lots of extended family living in Kantharalak and they all came to our house and I played with my cousins and brother. Again different from how I am used to celebrating but it was fun and I am glad I got to expierence how Thai people celebrate New Years Eve. After New Years I went back to school and everything was the same as before christmas until about the middle of January when my school started getting ready for sports week. For those of you who don't know what sports week is, since we don't do it in America which I really think we should change, I had so much fun, Sports week happens in every school all over Thailand Universities and elementary schools included. It is sort of like a mini olympics, the school is split up into colors and the colors play each other in all sorts of sports, there is a parade and shows and even giant stands made by each color. throughout the week the teachers judge everything and at the end there is a winner of the sports week. I didn't play any sports but I did help with lots of art projects, danced in the talent show and was a drum major in the parade. Sports Week was most definitely one of my favorite things I've done in Thailand so far and I was so bummed when it was over. I think those are all the highlights from the past 2 months. Other new things...I have become very close with my host brother and I am so grateful for that I didn't realize how much I missed having siblings until we started to talk. I play football at the park with him everyday and he loves to watch the Walking Dead with me and we even have inside jokes now! School will be ending next week and I'm both excited and sad. It will be hard to say goodbye to the M.6 kids, the seniors, because I have gotten very close to a lot of them but this summer I get to do lots of traveling with my host family and with rotary which I am very excited for! I'm not sure what else to write about so now I'll post some pictures!

I can't figure out how to post pictures onto a blog post from my Ipad! Sorry about that but if you go to my profile and then click the tab that says pictures I uploaded a few on there :)